I remember really enjoying How I Met Your Mother when it was airing. I tried for a rewatch recently and only made it a few episodes in because I was so disinterested. It felt empty, and the humor wasn’t hitting. I think it’s a combination of I’ve changed (I’ve aged out of the “20-something singles fool around in a fantasy version of NYC” demographic) and TV has evolved (good comedy shows are no longer just goofy hijink situations and setups for one-liners).
So instead I rewatched Archer season one (same era as HIMYM) and fortunately that one still slaps.
Mah. Mah.
Oh man. So many and so much. Most of the “comedy” from the 80s, 90s, early 2000s is unwatchable. Older movies are sometimes straight up disgusting. I think it’s a sign for how we grow as a society to be more aware of the sexism, racism and other forms of disrespect that has been sold as comedy or just as “normal”. I consume much more consciously and through a more meta lense. For reference: I’m turning 40 this year
I tried to rewatch John Tucker Must Die as something to have on in the background the other night, and wooow did that not hold up. I only made it to where they give him estrogen (which is insane and terrible) and he starts acting like a stereotypical “girl on her period” before I bailed. So many of the movies targeted at teenagers and young adults in that era are so bad. They went all in on punching down, and the amount of rape and sexual assault is wild in retrospect.
I like to watch those old shows because they are reminders that we really have made significant progress in my lifetime.
Primary source materials, really. A great window into the past.
I quit smoking pot and no longer enjoy the Spin Doctors. Well, that’s half true. I heard them straight one day and decided if that’s the kind of thing I like when I’m high, I should quit.
Well said, Little Miss. You can’t be wrong.
CBS laugh tracks are like nails on a blackboard to me now.
White noise laughter tracks wind me up no end. All the hype and screaming on comedy like it’s an opera or Ellen show is also painful to experience.
I might just be turning into a grumpy old fart but I also refuse to accept that people want awful pop music plumbed into our supermarkets and dance music in restaurants - why does everything degenerate into a nightclub setting?
Gremlins, watching it as an adult I realized it is not suitable for young kids 😅
Man… I remember having fond memories of it. Plus, sort of a Christmas flick. So come winter break, I turn it on for my eight year old. I get to cooking dinner and about 45 minutes in, he’s shaking from it. He slept in our room for the first time in years that night. And the next night. And the next.
Literally just told his mom he’s still scared of gremlins. This will be one of the parenting regrets.
If I were to watch Dragon Ball Z now, I’d probably drop the series. I still remember it fondly, but it’s too slow.
The first two seasons of the Pokémon anime aged well for me. Individual games, too. But the series as a whole felt from an “I know all 386!” to “…it’s a Tentaquil”.
Chrono Trigger went from “it’s okay, it’s fun” to “…I spent my whole life underrating it, didn’t I?” So did Final Fantasy VI.
Same deal with Dostoyevsky. I guess you need some maturity to understand things.
Baudelaire, though? Hard pass.
I still love 1984 and Animal Farm, but I want to drown 90% of the muppets talking about them.
I can’t stand Legião Urbana any more. Pink Floyd on the other hand aged well, so did Nenhum de Nós.
To be honest I was never too much into movies. There’s one or another thing that I like (Modern Times, 8 1/2, The Shining), but it’s mostly unchanged.
I think that’s what Dragon Ball Z Kai was trying to solve, the ridiculous pacing.
Granted, the pacing sucked back then too. I remember it taking years to get to the event where Goku finally went super Saiyan. That whole Namek saga dragged on for far too long with nothing actually happening.
The show Psych used to be a favorite of mine. When rewatching it recently, there’s a string of episodes a few seasons in that are just straight up all racial stereotypes
That’s interesting. I rewatch psych (as my comfort show) all the time and couldn’t really think of anything egregious. Mind sharing which episodes?
It’s been a hot minute, and I don’t particularly want to spend too much time on it, but I think season 5 episode 1 was the final straw with how they handle Chinese culture.
I’ve avoided rewatching Ace Ventura Pet Detective due to the transphobia
I recall in Boston Legal, William Shatner’s character said he liked Trump (this was before his presidency) and that has made me less interested in a rewatch
What happened in Ace Ventura Pet Detective?
There’s a woman who is revealed to be trans and a bunch of guys start dry-heaving upon learning this information
Not to mention Ace Ventura’s too-long scene of showering, burning his clothes, using a plunger to make himself throw up etc. So you kissed someone you didn’t know was trans, grow up.
I mean, it’s technically the police force’s fault for being so “into” her in the first place.
Not defending the joke, but they were dry heaving because it’s implied that she made out with everyone on the police force, including Ace. Thinking about it that’s actually worse. Huh.
Having not seen the scene until recently by coincidence, based on the description, I thought it was more like an “incels can’t handle this” joke, but then saw it and saw it was used as the smoking gun for an embarrassing guilty verdict. It definitely has “this movie director has an axe to grind” vibes.
Practically the whole movie is a trans joke. I rewatched it years ago and was so bummed out.
My reaction anytime I watch something with Jim Carrey. He was like a fad we just keep now for the novelty, no offense to him.
Watched Beetlejuice with the kids last night. Not as funny as I remember, and they weren’t laughing either.
OTOH, we all thought The Lost Boys was still pretty cool.
Blazing Saddles next?
I watched tons of anime. Now everything feels like a redo of something from years before and it’s hard to get into anything. I feel the same about movies.
I have never had patience for anime that goes on and on for hundreds of episodes. I find a lot of modern anime to be annoying in how flat and boring the presentation is.
That said, I have recently enjoyed both SpyXFamily and Dungeon Meshi. They both have quality to the art and as of yet feel like the are going somewhere and not intended to go on for 500 episodes.
Comedy in general. Others have given specific examples of things that are discriminatory, including racism and sexism.
On the one hand, it’s sad to realize that your old favorite movie is no longer that, but when you realize why I think it’s actually uplifting. You can feel that you’ve learned something, you’ve improved as a human being, that you care more about society.
And because there are many genres other than comedy, it’s not like you lost all of your favorite movies.
superhero movies. when the first Tobey Maguire Spiderman premiered, it was magical. i had wished for this exact thing for years.
now i can’t stand any of them. they’re cringe af, like watching a bunch of toddlers play pretend grown up.
I used to enjoy average Bollywood movies but now I have realized it was full of stupidity, cringe, fascist propaganda.
I have problems with a lot of scripted television now when I used to love it as a kid.
Hell, I have problems with some parts of TNG because there science has progressed so much since then. THE EXOCOMS ARE SPECIAL BECAUSE THEY HAVE SAPIENCE, THEY AREN’T LIFE!
I rewatched the usual suspects for the upteenhundreth time, I think it lost a little bit of its magic. Michael Baldwins character is just a bit too camera hungry and angry for me, some of the scenes have just lost their luster. It’s still a 9/10, but after 20 years I think it’s no longer my 10/10 go to for a guaranteed love rewatch movie. It hurts. Have I become jaded?
I haven’t seen it in so long, I only remember one thing about it. Yup. THAT thing. We should look it up one of these days. Thanks for the reminder!
